WHAT EVER -- A Living Novel

Focusing on the lives of more than a dozen characters—among them the Oregon rave boy Skeeter, hitchhiking across the country; the progressive-thinking octogenarian Violet, remembering her life from her bohemian youth in prewar Paris to her jazz-clubbing in postwar Greenwich Village; and the street-smart prostitute Bushie, holding forth on the profanity of the world—Heather Woodbury has forged a unique kind of fiction that combines the immediacy of performance art with the narrative structure and subtle characterization of a tradition novel. Taking off from her acclaimed one-woman show of the same title, Woodbury continually surprises in this novel with her ability to create new forms while always locating the unique, resonant humanity that links all the characters to one another—and to the reader.

About the Author
Heather Woodbury was born in northern California. After working in New York City as a barmaid, go-go dancer, and catering waitress as well as a performance artist, in 2001 she moved to Los Angeles, where she now lives.

"I Love the sheer ambition of What Ever--to describe our entire country through a dozen major characters and maybe a hundred minor ones...It is one of the greatest works you've never heard of."
---Ira Glass, host of This American Life

"Woodbury's remarkable, funny, outrageous, profoundly moving....epic.... carries us from a rave party in Santa Cruz, to the mean streets of the East Village and Times Square in the early 1990's...Miraculous.">
---Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun-Times>

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about

Heather Woodbury's What EverLos Angeles, California

"Standup novelist" Heather Woodbury is known for sprawling works that combine the seductions of cable TV serials with the
high-wire immediacy of live, solo storytelling. Her previous audio serial, What Ever, hosted by Ira Glass, was broadcast on public radio. Filmmaker Richard Linklater likens being engrossed in her works to "living INside a novel."She is published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux....more